I examine how financial incentives interact with intrinsic motivation and especially cognitive abilities in explaining heterogeneity in performance. Using a forecasting task with varying cognitive load, I show that the effectiveness of high-powered financial incentives as a stimulator of...

Unlike previous attempts to implement cooperation in a prisoners' dilemma game with an infinite horizon in the laboratory, we focus on extended prisoners' dilemma games in which a second (pure strategy) equilibrium allows for voluntary cooperation in all but the last round. Our four main...

Using a symmetric 2-person prisoners' dilemma as the base game, each player receives a signal for the number of rounds to be played with the same partner. The actual number of rounds (the length of the supergame) is determined by the maximal signal where each player expects the other's signal to...

We present results from a series of experiments that allow us to measure overbidding and, in particular, underbidding in first-price auctions. We investigate how the amount of underbidding depends on seemingly innocent parameters of the experimental setup. To structure our data we present and...

We extend evidence on the interaction between financial incentives and cognitive abilities by focusing on the effect of task-specific abilities. In a memory-intensive task situated in an accounting context, the effect of accounting education on performance is stronger under financial incentives...

We identify the causal effect of cognitive abilities on economic behavior in an experimental setting. Using a forecasting task with varying cognitive load, we identify the causal effect of working memory on subjects' forecasting performance, while also accounting for the effect of other...

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

We perform a comparative analysis of five incentivized tasks used to elicit risk preferences. Theoretically, we compare the elicitation methods in terms of completeness of the range of the estimates as well as their precision, the likelihood of triggering loss aversion, and problems arising when...

We investigate experimentally whether the protégés' reaction to paternalism depends on the consequences of the paternalistic action to their well-being. We find that protégé punish a paternalist restricting their freedom of choice. Yet, this negative reaction is not based on principled...

This paper experimentally examines a procedurally fair provision mech- anism allowing members of a small community to determine, via their bids, which of four alternative public projects to implement. Previous experi- ments with positive cost projects have demonstrated that the mechanism is...